Ensemble Approach for Detecting COVID-19 Propaganda on Online Social Networks

Abstract

     COVID-19 affected the entire world due to the unavailability of the vaccine. The social distancing was a contributing factor that gave rise to the usage of Online Social Networks. It has been seen that people share the information that comes to them without verifying its source . One of the common forms of information that is disseminated that have a radical purpose is propaganda. Propaganda is organized and conscious method of molding conclusions and impacting an individual's contemplations to accomplish the ideal aim of proselytizer. For this paper, different propagandistic tweets were shared in the COVID-19 Era. Data regarding COVID-19 propaganda was extracted from Twitter. Labelling of data was performed manually using different propaganda identification techniques  and Hybrid feature engineering was used to select the essential features. Ensemble machine learning classifiers were used for performing the binary classification. Adaboost shows an accuracy of 98.7%, which learns from a weak learning algorithm by updating the weights.